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Cattle giant to cash in carbon credits

The Tipperary Group has earned carbon credits for its early season burning program

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The Tipperary Group has become the first beef producer in Australia to earn carbon credits under the savanna burning carbon farming methodology.

The company has been issued over 26,000 credits for its early-season burning program, which was carried out across four of its stations in the Northern Territory; Elizabeth Downs, Litchfield Station, Douglas Station and Tipperary Station.

General manager of the Tipperary Group, David Warriner, says the company is hopeful of selling the credits for over $500,000.

"The money is not in the bank yet, but there's certainly interest (in buying the credits) for over $22 a tonne, so that's looking pretty good."

Mr Warriner says the dollars look good this year, but the future of the project doesn't look as profitable.

"The change in government has probably made it worse because the carbon tax in now going to be rescinded, and our $22 a tonne will end up in the free market in a couple of years, and that certainly won't be $22 (a tonne).

"It could be $6 a tonne... and then it's probably not viable."

Overall, Mr Warriner says the project has been challenging.

"There's a hell of a lot of work in it, a lot of expenses in terms of helicopters, ground truthing, auditing, and we brought in extra people and spent quite a bit of money doing it," he said.

"We're just lucky we've got the scale and it makes those costs a bit cheaper.

"I wouldn't get too excited about it. We're only in it for a while, because the new free market price is not going to justify it,

"We're in the 1,000-millimetre rainfall area, with a large parcel of land, so it made it viable for us, but I wouldn't be getting too excited about it or wasting too much money on it if I was the normal beef producer."

In an interesting twist to the savanna burning methodology, a huge bushfire which burnt around 35,000 hectares of Tipperary Station a few weeks ago will actually cost the company money, because it will now receive fewer carbon credits.

"That fire occurred after the critical date, which is the end of July, so it becomes a 'hot fire' and because we didn't prevent it with early burning it has an impact on our credits next year.. in that we won't get as many."

"So these people deliberately lighting fires up north is becoming a major issue, and going forward you could actually put dollars on the damage."